Don Carlos

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This production by John Caird for Welsh National Opera takes “authenticity” to manic lengths by including stuff that Verdi cut before the premiere as well as subsequently rethinking. It makes a lengthy evening, and you realise how ruthless the composer was: if it diluted the drama, it went in the bin.

As often, we are in a blank universe that crushes a humanity searching vainly for meaning, connection and redemption.

The opera’s torment-freighted conversations and soliloquys are interspersed with the public results of the pseudo-struggle between individuals, Church and state in 17th-century Spain: public executions and an unlikely revolt. Presumably